Top all-time · #1351
Oliver Steele
Personal blog · osteele.comprogrammingwebdesign
Oliver Steele's personal blog at osteele.com covers programming, web and design. Since 2007, 55 different Hacker News readers have linked it 81 times, most often “Functional javascript in one page”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Oliver Steele - Software engineer, researcher, educator, and maker
Most-linked posts?
- Functional javascript in one page14 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2007-09-28
- reAnimator: Regular Expression FSA Visualizer 8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2007-12-03
- The Blub Paradox also applies to editors/IDEs6 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2007-10-25
- The IDE Divide (2004)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-11-01
- Functional Javascript, full-fledged and well documented.2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2007-07-23
- Practical Functional JavaScript2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-10-04
- /tools/rework/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-04-20
- /posts/2004/11/ides2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-12-26
- The Programmer's Food Pyramid 2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-01-17
- Visualizing Regular Expressions 2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-01-16
What Hacker News says?
Oliver Steele describes "Instance First Development", which the language he designed, OpenLaszlo, supported through the "Instance Substitution Principle". I've written about it here before, and here are some links and excerpts. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14418108 In the right context, prototypes can enable Instance-First Development, which is a very powerful technique that allows you to quickly and iterati…
Comment linking /archives/2003/08/rethinking-mvc
on “Goodbye, Clean Code”Submitted Functional javascript in one page as a story · 60 points
HN discussionAnother way of stating it is that Svelte doesn't attempt to plug any of the leaky abstractions that already existed in JavaScript. JavaScript is riddled with huge footguns that aren't even exotic use cases, and if you remove or paper over them, then it's not JavaScript any more. While React's biggest most obvious leaky abstraction is that React isn't actually reactive. Neither is Svelte, but at least Svelte doesn't…
Comment linking /archives/2003/08/rethinking-mvc
on “Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time”Submitted The IDE Divide (2004) as a story · 32 points
HN discussionNo mention of pandas or nltk? I'd never heard of pattern before, and while it looks like it's a nice bundle of features, I'm concerned by the fact it references pyWordNet by name even though it hasn't been an independent project since 2006 ( http://osteele.com/projects/pywordnet/ ). Has anyone actually used it?
Comment linking /projects/pywordnet/
on “Python Libraries you should know about”Submitted My No TV as a story · 26 points
HN discussionUnfortunately it seems to be broken now, but reAnimator was an awesome regex visualization tool ( http://osteele.com/tools/reanimator/ ). It let you enter a regex and would display the state machine similar to this, but then it would also let you enter a string and it would animate the progress of the string matching (or not) against the state machine as you enter each character.
Comment linking /tools/reanimator/
on “Regexper: Beautiful regexp visualizations”Submitted The Blub Paradox also applies to editors/IDEs as a story · 19 points
HN discussionI knew I've seen it before somewhere. NVI posted an example [1] below [2] where it can be seen live. ________ [1] http://osteele.com/tools/reanimator/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=NVI
Comment linking /tools/reanimator/
on “Show HN: UI Concept – Focus Transition”Submitted reAnimator: Regular Expression FSA Visualizer as a story · 15 points
HN discussionA couple of years ago I saw http://osteele.com/tools/reanimator/ , OpenLaszlo based RegExp tester. The animation on tabbing between text fields was unusual and interesting. I implemented a similar effect using JS & CSS, and made Chrome and Safari extensions. I released it just two days ago.
Comment linking /tools/reanimator/
on “Show HN: UI Concept – Focus Transition”Submitted Functional Javascript, full-fledged and well documented. as a story · 15 points
HN discussionI had the older version bookmarked http://gskinner.com/RegExr/ which now redirects to this site. Some other good sites that I've used are: http://regviz.org/ https://regex101.com/ http://osteele.com/tools/rework/ http://www.rexv.org/ https://www.debuggex.com/
Comment linking /tools/rework/
on “RegExr: A website for interactive regex prototyping with syntax highlighting”Submitted Using the git index to fearlessly try out risky changes as a story · 12 points
HN discussionThis reminds me a lot of the regular expression reAnimator: http://osteele.com/tools/reanimator/ .
Comment linking /tools/reanimator/
on “Why I am building a product with a tiny market”Submitted Functional Javascript as a story · 12 points
HN discussionI'm reminded of The IDE Devide ( http://osteele.com/posts/2004/11/ides ), which describes the differences between a "langauge maven" (which I'll admit to being) and a "tool maven".
Comment linking /posts/2004/11/ides
on “Why Everyone Eventually Hates or Leaves Maven”Submitted Practical Functional JavaScript as a story · 9 points
HN discussionthis 2004 post by oliver steele remains one of the best things i've read on the topic: http://www.osteele.com/posts/2004/11/ides key quote: "In fact, the most powerful languages may initially have the least powerful tool support. The reason for this is that the language developer, like the language adopter, has to make a choice: whether to dedicate limited development resources towards language features, or towards…
Comment linking /posts/2004/11/ides
on “Lamdu - towards the next generation IDE”Submitted One-Line Javascript memoization as a story · 8 points
HN discussionThis PHP code https://github.com/osteele/wideurl.com/blob/master/wideurl.p... turns e.g. http://osteele.com/archives/2006/04/wideurl into `http://w-i-d-e-u-r-l.com/aitch-tee-tee-pea-colon-double-slash-oh-ess-tee-double-ee-ell-ee-dot-see-oh-em-slash-aye-are-see-aitch-eye-vee-ee-ess-slash-two-double-zero-six-slash-zero-four-slash-doubleyou-eye-dee-ee-you-are-ell`. It was loosely inspired by a BBC broadcast I heard du…
Comment linking /archives/2006/04/wideurl
on “Don't just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening (2010)”Submitted The Programmer's Food Pyramid as a story · 8 points
HN discussionHere's something related, an oldie but goodie on the effects on learning programming of editors vs ide: http://osteele.com/archives/2004/11/ides
Comment linking /archives/2004/11/ides
on “Why I Still Use Emacs”Submitted Regular Expression FSA Visualizer as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI write code like that. I tend to have a good idea of what the code should be doing, and write it out, char by char, like prose. I also avoid IDEs and prefer text editors. In the twenty-five years of programming, I've not found an IDE I like, and I suspect I'm a langauge-maven than a tool-maven ( http://osteele.com/posts/2004/11/ides ) (as long as I can type, I can try out a new language; I don't have to wait for a…
Comment linking /posts/2004/11/ides
on “Typing.io: Typing Practice for Programmers”Submitted Overloading Semicolon, or, monads from 10,000 Feet as a story · 6 points
HN discussionWith Emacs, the languages change but the tool stays the same, you just extend it. In a way akin to how programming enhances my mind to be able to solve tough problems, emacs enhances my capacity to hack by letting me hack the tool itself. Oblig reference to classic essay on that topic: http://www.osteele.com/posts/2004/11/ides
Comment linking /posts/2004/11/ides
on “Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors”Submitted Functional javascript as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> require IDEs http://osteele.com/archives/2004/11/ides
Comment linking /archives/2004/11/ides
on “Why You Can't Hire Great Perl Programmers”Submitted Functional Javascript as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
